June 16, 2004

A guilty pleasure read

I just whipped through The Devil Wears Prada. I was curious about it and it was about $7 at Costco. I was willing to take a chance for $7 since you pay more than that in NYC to go to the movies. This was not a good book. It was not well written. It did not sketch a reasonably good explanation for how the protagonist let herself become so totally submerged to the point where her ego became almost zilch. In fact, almost none of the characters were well developed. If you don't know about the book, it's a thinly veiled fictional account of the time the author spent as the personal assistant to Anna Wintour at Vogue. (Another excuse for reading this, by the way, is that I represent a former employee of Vogue in litigation with the publication and its corporate parent). So, basically, the book as a book really sucked.

That said, it was an amusing, light, easy read and a perfect guilty pleasure. Take it to the beach. If it gets wet, no big loss.

If you're still reading, let me give you a link to a very interesting review of the book that I found from the National Review. It contains a great little dig at the NY Times for savaging the book based on at least one totally self-interested reviewer.

UPDATE: John Bruce kindly points out that the National Review link doesn't work. Let me instead give you this link to a Google search which should bring up, as the first result, the National Review article which you can go to from the Google search page.